We have a very sick baby in the family. Poor little Aiden, one of the people in this world who least deserves to be in pain, is in the hospital tonight with pneumonia. At this point we don’t know if they’re going to keep him overnight, but he’s been to the doctor several times in the last few days with stomach flu, and he was so lethargic tonight that Tammy took him to the emergency room.

They told her he wasn’t dangerously dehydrated, which is what she had feared when she took him in. But they also wanted to do a chest X-ray, and that showed the pneumonia. So they are pumping him full of saline and antibiotics and doing whatever it is they do for a 21-month-old in that condition. I don’t know, but I saw the look on his face and he just wasn’t our happy little toddler. His eyes had that haunted look, and he wouldn’t eat.

He did try to talk and laugh, though, because that’s the kind of child he is. That’s part of the problem, of course. He’s so good-natured and eager to please that it’s hard to tell when he’s sick. When he’s so sick that he shows it, you have to take it seriously. Some of the doctors he saw earlier in the week might have to bear some of the responsibility for his current condition, because they didn’t look closely enough to see how sick he really was.

At least the other three kids seem to be healthy, which is a blessing. Tammy and David are holding up the best they can, but it’s heartbreaking to see a child like Aiden without the spark that makes him the special person we know him to be. When I was with him tonight, before he went back to the hospital, he looked up and saw me and gave me the usual “Hi, Uncle Mike” in a sorry little scratchy voice that told me a lot about how bad he was feeling.